Carrying My Weight

Sunday, April 18

6:30 pm

Yesterday morning when I woke up, my muscles felt like lead again. It was so hard to get them moving, so I tried to warm them up a bit. I moved to my wheelchair and did manage to get my muscles to feel a little better after a while. I had a slow morning and watched about half of the Caps game until Linda arrived at two.

Linda wheeled me outside for a walk around the parking lot, which felt wonderful. When we got back inside, a woman said she had been looking for us. She was a PT I hadn’t met before named Cindy. She had extra time in her schedule, so she took me to the CORE gym for an impromptu PT session, while Linda watched through the window. I liked Cindy a whole lot. She knows more dumb jokes than I do! (E.g., What do you call a dinosaur fart? A blast from the past.) I told her I met Linda in Korea…she’s my Seoul mate. (Christine will spare you the rest of the jokes, to which she responded with equal parts laughter and groaning.)

In between all the jokes, Cindy wanted to see how well I could walk without the aid of the harness. So I stood up, with the help of a therapy tech on each side of me, and with no offloading of weight I walked 150 feet in a circle and sat back down. Cindy thought that was pretty great, so she told me to go all the way around the yellow track. So I got up and walked 220 feet. After a short sit, I got up and walked another 220 feet. I have been curious about how I would do without a harness bearing my weight, and I was very pleased with how I did. Admittedly, the techs did catch me from falling a few times, but overall I thought I did really well. (Linda thought so, too. She told Christine she had tears of joy at the sight.)

Linda's view of my walk through the window. The cuff on my right leg provides the electrical stimulation discussed in previous posts.

Cindy then took me to a bench and we worked on my core strength for a little bit. Finally, she worked on stretching my muscles. That felt so good—I would have let her do that for the rest of the afternoon.

Later in the afternoon, I did some arm exercises on my own. I had been given a pamphlet that had some suggested exercises in it requiring a one-pound weight. So I did eight reps each of a few exercises, such as holding the one-pound weight on my wrist and keeping my arm up for five seconds. It was pretty demoralizing doing anything with a one-pound weight, and to add insult to injury the brochure had a picture of an ancient woman doing the exercises. So here I was gritting my teeth to hold up a one-pound weight while starting at a 90-year-old woman with a serene look on her face doing the same thing.

Last night, I slept really well. At some point during the night, I managed to roll myself onto my side and sleep like that for a couple hours. That’s the first time I’ve done that since the night before the accident.

Today was a pretty chill day; there was nothing on my schedule except three meals and another visit from Linda. I felt really good when I got up this morning. I sat in my chair and spent the morning making some phone calls and doing a few exercises (though not as many as I probably should’ve done). Again I caught part of the Caps game before Linda showed up. When Linda arrived, she took me outside again for a stroll and a roll. I got my workout in by propelling myself in my chair part of the way on our walk (though Linda did push me on the incline back to the building).

Back to "work" tomorrow!